Since their introduction, the use of mobile telephones has grown to the point where mobile telephones are almost ubiquitous. In many cases, users have replaced traditional landline telephones with mobile telephones.
Location sharing services are software products designed to enable people to share their location with another person or entity, with a group of people or entities, or with themselves for their own viewing. This location information is typically derived from the location of a mobile phone or similar device using a variety of techniques. As an example, Sprint Family Locator, Family Locator by Verizon, AT&T FamilyMap®, T Mobile FamilyWhere® are examples of such products, tailored to families, where the focus is on giving parents a user interface to view the location of their families' phones.
The variety of approaches these services use to determine the location of participants' devices can be generally broken into two categories: network-based location techniques vs. client-based location techniques. Network-based location techniques typically rely on existing network and device infrastructure to remotely query location information, while client-based location techniques typically rely on information made available at the operating system (OS) level to locally installed apps. Network-based location techniques do not generally require the installation of a new app on the sharing person's device, while client-based location techniques generally do.
Because location information can be considered sensitive, obtaining consent is an important theme for location sharing services.